Current Streak: 0 Straight Weekends #1 Predicted Correctly
Threat Level to Starting a New Streak: Medium
Reason: Looper is getting heavy marketing, but the family dollar has to make a comeback at some point, plus the MTC tracking suggests I’ve got the winner this weekend.
Hotel Transylvania is your likely victor this weekend, with a healthy estimate of $8,600 per theater and a $28.4 million weekend. It’s not a good movie, (trust me) but we all know that hardly matters in the box office wars. Looper, conversely, is a very solid film, but it’s spotting Hotel Transylvania 500 theaters. It’s also rated R, which isn’t conducive to winning a weekend, though of course three of the past four weekend winners have been rated R. You can expect the “R Rated is back!!” EW headline any moment now should Looper take it, but I have it falling short at $22.4 million.
Looking further down the board we can expect a 40 – 45 percent dip for House at the End of the Street, but as the film already stands at $13 million on a $10 million production budget, it was very well timed. End of Watch is another financial winner, it will hit $23 million on a $7 million production budget this weekend. If you look at the history of Open Road Films distribution you can tell they are playing very well in the “smaller film / adult drama” arena, with the only misfire being Killer Elite (they took a bath on that one). Still, Hit and Run, The Grey, and now End of Watch make them a distribution company on the rise.
On the negative side of the ledger, Lionsgate must be massively unhappy with the performance of Dredd 3D, especially since critics basically enjoyed it and the budget was a whopping $40 million. While Lionsgate only contributed a small amount to the budget, it apparently spent $25 million on prints and advertising alone. Could we be done with the reboot/remake disease? No, never, but it’s fun to posit questions we all know the answer to. If you’re looking for truly obscure trivia, Won’t Back Down is tracking in the seventh slot at $6.2 million and Pitch Perfect should finish in eleventh, largely due to limited theater counts.
How say you? There’s four new releases to consider, and a new streak to start, so predictions away!
SIDE NOTE: Some of the theater numbers below are estimates. We’ll have the actual counts in Sunday’s wrap-up article.
